Aging Legacy Software, Once America’s Greatest Asset is Now its Greatest Weakness

Today, hundreds of billions of lines of legacy code represent more than 80% of all software in active use throughout the United States. This enormous code base runs critical operations for our nation’s businesses, government agencies and organizations.

In my latest blog series, I have focused on the risks posed by our aging legacy applications. At this point some background may be helpful.

For decades, Enterprise system developers analyzed the essential operations of their respective organizations, and designed, developed and perfected software that automated and supported those critical functions. Their efforts produced corporate America’s most valuable asset - systems that codify and facilitate strategic procedures and policies that deliver productivity and competitive advantage to the corporations and governments they support. These legacy applications have successfully supported our nation’s critical operations for many decades and our government agencies and corporations cannot operate without them.

Ironically, the reliability and stability of these critical systems has led to appalling complacency on the part of the beneficiaries of these indispensable legacy applications. Long term neglect has undermined the effectiveness of those assets to deliver productivity and competitive advantage to the corporations and governments that depend on them.

Furthermore, the marginalization of these critical systems, their developers and the indispensable value they provide to our economy has quashed the allure of pursuing education, training and careers in developing and supporting legacy systems.

Presently, there is a perilous shortage of developers with proficiency in these legacy programming languages. The average age of a legacy programmer today is at or near retirement age. Though experts estimate that there are 250 billion lines of COBOL code actively deployed today, there are not enough COBOL programmers to adequately maintain those systems. RPG, the primary programming language of IBM’s AS/400 – IBMi platform has not been offered in colleges and universities for more than 15 years.

Corporate America’s greatest asset is now also its greatest weakness. As I mentioned in my last blog, the current pandemic has exposed the inability of our state’s unemployment agencies to quickly adapt the legacy systems to address the urgent need to provide Americans with Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) under the CARES Act. Which legacy application will be tested and exposed next? What vital need will be denied because of the aging system? What if a crucial legacy application fails? How will the organization operate without it? What will happen when the last legacy programmer retires?

It is no longer a question of “if” but of “when” we will suffer a breakdown of our declining enterprise technology infrastructure. Crises of this magnitude cannot be solved overnight. Therefore, the contingency plans of every government agency and corporation in America must address and obviate these risks as soon as possible. Next week's blog will address the possible ways this can be done.

ETS can help you make the transformation https://www.etsassociates.com/contact-us.

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The Biggest threat to our Nation’s Infrastructure is Our Aging Legacy Application Software

Over the past 40+ years, our nation’s businesses, organizations and Federal, State and Local government agencies have invested trillions of dollars to develop powerful software that successfully runs critical functions for their respective organizations without fail on a daily basis. Even today, these applications, containing hundreds of billions of lines of out of date programming code, are among the most valuable corporate and organizational assets in our economy.

Unfortunately, over the decades, these legacy systems have not kept up with the pace of new strategic technological innovation. Though this software is now several generations behind the latest technology, these applications continue to provide essential operational support to our nation’s corporations, organizations and government agencies.

Collectively, our corporate and political leaders, and our IT industry have turned a blind eye to the risks posed by these aging legacy applications. For the past 15 years, the overwhelming investment in strategic software has focused on deploying modern technology to the front end, “public-facing” applications while leaving the back end, “back office” functionality where it has been since the 70’s and 80’s or before.

This incremental “kick the can” practice has led to nationwide complacency regarding these inflexible, fragile systems. When consumers of these systems access modern, front end applications, they assume that the systems are state of the art. Few realize that behind the front end veneer, most of the workload is performed by cumbersome, outdated legacy applications with a dwindling number of resources capable of supporting them.

The recent Coronavirus pandemic and our government’s response to the catastrophe has publicly and decisively exposed the grim reality about the true state of our nation’s critical enterprise systems.

As the U.S. economy was largely shut down resulting in an historic loss of jobs, the CARES Act was passed to inject urgently needed funds into our ailing economy. Though the Federal government acted swiftly to pass this legislation, the outdated systems in most states have been unable to process applications for the new unemployment benefits provided for in the law.

This crisis has revealed the threat posed by our collective failure to face, accept and address the challenge of updating the nation’s most critical infrastructure – its aging legacy applications. Though this is one of the first nationally recognized failures of this magnitude, it will not be the last. It is only a matter of time before other outdated legacy systems suffer the same fate with severe consequences to the corporations and governments that depend on them.

In subsequent blogs over the next few weeks, I will discuss the threats posed by this crumbling infrastructure, the limitations of ineffective stop gap solutions and will ultimately propose how we can successfully transform these applications. Doing nothing is no longer a viable option.

ETS can help you make the transformation https://www.etsassociates.com/contact-us.

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